First published in 1906 when Sarbah was a prominent Gold Coast nationalist and scholar.

Born in the Gold Coast in 1864, John Mensah Sarbah qualified as a barrister in London and later became a leading critic of British colonial rule, especially in connection with land ownership.

The communities along the coastline of Ghana boast a long and vibrant maritime culture. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the region experienced creeping British imperialism and incorporation into the British Gold Coast colony. Drawing on a wealth of Ghanian archival sources, historian Kwaku Nti shows how many aspects of traditional maritime daily life—customary ritual performances, fishing, and concepts of ownership, and land—served as a means of resistance and allowed residents to contest and influence the socio-political transformations of the era. Nti explored how the Ebusua (female) and Asafo (male) local social groups, especially in Cape Coast, became bastions of indigenous identity and traditions during British colonial rule, while at the same time functioning as focal points for demanding a share of emerging economic opportunities. A convincing demonstration of the power of the indigenous everyday life to complicate the reach of empire, Maritime Culture and Everyday Life in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Coastal Ghana reveals a fuller history of West African coastal communities.

An analysis of the ties between culture and every aspect of African life, using Africa's past to explain present situations. This book focuses on the modern cultures of Africa, from the consequences of the imposition of Western rule to the current struggles to define national identities in the context of neo-liberal economic policies and globalization.The book argues that it is against the backdrop of foreign influences that Africa has defined for itself notions of identity and development. African cultures have been evolving in response to change, and in other ways solidly rooted in a shared past. The book successfully deconstructs the last one hundred and fifty years of cultures that have been disrupted, replaced, and resurrected. The Power of African Cultures challenges many preconceived notions, such as male dominance and female submission, the supposed unity of ethnic groups, and contemporary Western stereotypes of Africans. It also shows the dynamism of African cultures to adapt to foreign imposition: even as colonial rule forced the adoption of foreign institutions and cultures, African cultures appropriated these elements. Traditions were reworked, symbols redefined, and the past situated in contemporary problems in order to accommodate the modern era. Toyin Falola is a Fellow of the Nigerian Academy of Letters and Fellow of the Historical Society of Nigeria. He is the recipient of the 2006 Cheikh Anta Diop Award for Exemplary Scholarship in AfricanStudies, and the 2008 Quintessence Award by the Africa Writers Endowment. He holds an honorary doctorate from Monmouth University and he is University Distinguished Teaching Professor at the University of Texas at Austin where heis also the Jacob and Frances Sanger Mossiker Chair in the Humanities. His books include Nationalism and African Intellectuals and Violence in Nigeria, both from the University of Rochester Press.

Covering 500 years of Ghana's history, The Ghana Reader provides a multitude of historical, political, and cultural perspectives on this iconic African nation. Whether discussing the Asante kingdom and the Gold Coast's importance to European commerce and transatlantic slaving, Ghana's brief period under British colonial rule, or the emergence of its modern democracy, the volume's eighty selections emphasize Ghana's enormous symbolic and pragmatic value to global relations. They also demonstrate that the path to fully understanding Ghana requires acknowledging its ethnic and cultural diversity and listening to its population's varied voices. Readers will encounter selections written by everyone from farmers, traders, and the clergy to intellectuals, politicians, musicians, and foreign travelers. With sources including historical documents, poems, treaties, articles, and fiction, The Ghana Reader conveys the multiple and intersecting histories of Ghana's development as a nation, its key contribution to the formation of the African diaspora, and its increasingly important role in the economy and politics of the twenty-first century.

Imperial Justice explores the imperial control of judicial governance and the adjudication of colonial difference in British Africa. Focusing on the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council and the colonial regional Appeal Courts for West Africa and East Africa, it examines how judicial discourses of native difference and imperial universalism in local disputes influenced practices of power in colonial settings and shaped an evolving jurisprudence of Empire. Arguing that the Imperial Appeal Courts were key sites where colonial legal modernity was fashioned, the book examines the tensions that permeated the colonial legal system such as the difficulty of upholding basic standards of British justice while at the same time allowing for local customary divergence which was thought essential to achieving that justice. The modernizing mission of British justice could only truly be achieved through recognition of local exceptionality and difference. Natives who appealed to the Courts of Empire were entitled to the same standards of justice as their 'civilized' colonists, yet the boundaries of racial, ethnic, and cultural difference somehow had to be recognized and maintained in the adjudicatory process. Meeting these divergent goals required flexibility in colonial law-making as well as in the administration of justice. In the paradox of integration and differentiation, imperial power and local cultures were not always in conflict but were sometimes complementary and mutually reinforcing. The book draws attention not only to the role of Imperial Appeal Courts in the colonies but also to the reciprocal place of colonized peoples in shaping the processes and outcomes of imperial justice. A valuable addition to British colonial literature, this book places Africa in a central role, and examines the role of the African colonies in the shaping of British Imperial jurisprudence.

"This expansive history of Black political thought shows us the origins--and the echoes--of anticolonial liberation on a global scale. On the Scale of the World examines the reverberations of the transnational struggle for Black anticolonial liberation. Between the 1920s and 1940s, Black intellectuals established theories of colonialism and racism as world-spanning structures that must be understood, and resisted, on a global scale. In this book, Musab Younis gathers the work of writers and poets, journalists and editors, historians and political theorists whose anticolonial insights speak urgently to contemporary movements for liberation. Bringing together literary and political texts from Black writers in Nigeria, Ghana, Sierra Leone, France, the United States, and elsewhere, Younis excavates this vibrant and understudied tradition of international political thought. From the hypocrisy of French colonial assimilation to the economic crisis in West Africa and the attacks on Haiti, Liberia, and Ethiopia, On the Scale of the World shows how counternarratives of global order enabled original ways of thinking about race, nation, and empire"--

For the better part of two centuries, racial domination has been the central concern of African social thought. Other questions, among them national identity, the role of chieftaincy, representation, justice, and constitutional design, have often been defined in relation to a preoccupation with racial and colonial forms of domination. This book, by examining the history of African thought, will prove an invaluable tool to those new thinkers who have begun to revisit the intellectual history of Africa at the outset of the twenty-first century.